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105 of 116 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Full fathom five thy father lies, September 3, 2006
I suppose that there must be some people in world for whom the name "David Wiesner" means nothing. I can't fathom what this kind of an existence must be like. I suppose it would be the literary equivalent of not knowing what chocolate was. Or snow. The minute the new Wiesner book comes out I, like hundreds of thousands of others like me, rush out to purchase it for friends, relatives, and passing acquaintances I met once in the grocery store. Little wonder that the man has won two Caldecott Medals AND two Caldecott Honors. Now one of those numbers is about to change since Wiesner has produced his most ambitious creation to date. Wordless (as always) and more intense than his light-hearted "Tuesday" and "Sector 7" ever were, this is a book overflowing in deep-water mysteries and delights.
A scientifically minded young man is closely examining the various critters and crabs he finds washed up along the beachshore when he's suddenly doused in a wave. When he emerges he's sitting on the sand with an old-fashioned camera beside him. On its front are the words, "Melville underwater camera". Intrigued, the boy plucks out the film and takes it to a one hour photo store. The pictures he get back, however, are nothing a person could imagine. Mechanical fish swimming with real ones, hot-air pufferfish, entire civilizations living on the backs of gigantic starfish... and that's just the tip of the iceberg. The last photo, however, is the most interesting of them all. In it, a girl holds a picture of a boy holding a picture of a boy, holding a picture of a girl, and so on. Our boy gets out his magnifying glass and sees even more pictures of kids holding pictures of kids. And when he gets out his microscope he can see all the way back to the very first picture in the batch ever taken. When last we see of our hero he has taken a picture of himself holding the last photo with the Melville camera. Then he tosses it into the sea, where we see it acting out a couple of adventures until the last picture in the book. A girl on a tropical beach reaches for the camera, half-buried in the sand.
That was less of a summary and more a retelling of the entire book, I know. I have a hard time with encapsulation when I find myself so deeply in love with a picture book. And now I'm having a very hard time figuring out what to coo over first. Let's talk details. Wiesner may well be the king of them. Some people see his work as a colorful version of Chris Van Allsburg. I can see where these people are coming from, but Van Allsburg is far more interested in tone and mood than in meticulously researched, thought through details. Consider what Wiesner has accomplished with, "Flotsam". First of all, there isn't a single thing that happens in this book that feels out of place or out of the blue. For example, at the end of this story our hero takes a picture of himself with the picture of the multiple kids. So where did he get the film? Well, if you track back to when he was getting the film developed, you see him purchasing some 120 color film (which is Kodak yellow, though Wiesner's too classy to put in any product placement). Another remarkable detail? Look at all the pictures of the children. As they go back in time their hair and clothing styles change accordingly. You can see that the child from the 1980s is holding a picture of a child from the 1970s. Then, after a while, we're in the 50s, the 40s, the 30s, and finally we're at the turn of the century. The film is black and white by this point, but when you consider what kind of camera we're dealing with that makes perfect sense. Wiesner even beveled the edges of the 1950s picture.
So that's the realistic part of the book (so to speak). The crazy underwater stuff is interesting in an entirely different way. Who thinks up gigantic starfish with islands on their heads? Or tiny aliens vacationing alongside some somewhat weirded-out seahorses? It's here that Wiesner really lets himself go all out. Kids who've read his previous books may also enjoy seeing his collection of flotsam items on the title pages. The black and white pig may also look especially familiar to them...
Great story. Great illustrations. Great great book. If the storytelling style (almost comic-like in its use of panels and divisions) doesn't get you then the outright well-thought out wonderfulness of it all will. An amazing addition to any collection. Your kids will never look at the sea the same way again.
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44 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fabulous Wiesner , October 30, 2006
David Wiesner's fans will be tickled pink with his latest book. Flotsam takes for its setting the Jersey seaside and the author's memories of his trips to the beach as a young boy. (The back flap of the dust jacket has a color photo of Wiesner as a five year old looking perfectly suited to slip right into his book!) Painted quite appropriately in watercolors, and utilizing a horizontal format, with pages wider than they are tall, the book perfectly captures the reflection of light at the seaside while framing the spacious broad strech of blue waterline against the long strip of sandy beach. Opening with a long shot of a young boy digging at the tideline with his bucket we turn the page to find ourselves staring face-to-face with an enormous hermit crab! Looking again we realize the crab is not sitting on beach sand but the boy's upturned palm, while an enormous eye - the boy's eye seen through a magnifying glass - gazes down behind the upturned twitching two eyes of the crab. Then things jump back to regular size on the next page but only for a moment as Wiesner constantly shifts the size and format of each step of his silent story. Like the boy we are meant to look carefully and from every possible angle. The title marvelously conveys the narrative method as mysterious snapshots flit back and forth with a young boy's curiousity of what lies out beyond the waves. Mr. Wiesner achieves almost a perfect storyboard, deftly mixing and merging images of varying sizes with his now unequalled mastery of visual storytelling, the sum producing an utterly delightful experience. Large sea turtles, their backs bedecked with villages of shell grottos sail through the water with the same wonderful stillness as the magical pigs in Tuesday. The becharmed juxtaposition of imagination and reality is reinforced in the name of the old-fashioned box camera washed ashore: Melville. And like Melville's epic Moby Dick factual data coexists side by side with the wildest fancies. Here whales can appear as a single enormous eye - the theme of the book is looking and how we record impressions - or as small guppies swimming below gargantuan walking starfish the size of tropical islands. Scale and perspective are handled with Wiesner's virtuoso touch; there is never any sense of heaviness or display for its own sake. His colors have never been richer or more brilliantly managed - the rich hues of a scene with small aliens as underwater tourists is quite the equal of William Joyce's palette. Somehow even the ebb and flow of the waves comes across in this brilliantly achieved work.
Combining the child's eye and imagination of Sector 7 with the dizzying draughtmanship and narrative gamemanship of The Three Pigs, Flotsam finds Wiesner the most brilliant Children's Book illustrator currently active. Despite all the gushing about Van Allsburg in the official notes it's now clear that these days Wiesner is working on a more exalted level of artistry.
P.S. Do take off your dustjacket for a surprise!
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41 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Full of surprises, and rewarding to the imagination, January 27, 2007
Flotsam is a wordless picture book, with detailed illustrations that reward close examination. A young boy is at the beach with his parents, with no other kids to play with. He entertains himself by examining crabs with his magnifying glass. Venturing too close to the water, he's toppled by a large wave. In its wake, the wave leaves a boxy, old-fashioned, underwater camera. As any right-minded child would do, he takes the film from the camera to a one-hour photo store, and also replaces it with a new roll of film. Returning to the beach, he examines the photos, and finds documentation of a fantastic underwater world filled with surprises.
The illustrations of the underwater world are different in tone from the illustrations of the boy on the beach. The beachside pages have an old-fashioned look about them, and are fairly sparse. They are frequently framed as a series of smaller pictures set on the same larger page. The scene where the boy is waiting for the one-hour photo captures perfectly his impatience, through a series of small images.
The underwater photos are more colorful, more whimsical, and very detailed. The boy finds photos of mechanical fish, octopuses who sit in armchairs and read to their children, tiny underwater aliens wearing bubble helmets, gigantic starfish with islands on their backs, and giant turtles bearing shell cities. Some of the details will make the reader laugh aloud, like the underwater fishbowl, with fish casually swimming in and out, the blowfish as open-air balloon, the electric eels working as light bulbs, and the spotted fish wearing a collar around its non-neck, with the name-tag Spot.
The last picture that the boy finds is of a girl, who is holding a picture of a boy, who in turn is holding a picture of a girl, and so on. Turning to his trusty microscope, the boy finds that this nesting of photos continues through several levels. Going back far enough, the pictures start to be in black and white, then in sepia, the clothing old fashioned. It's a perfect chain of all of the people who have found the camera.
Realizing what he has to do, the boy takes his own picture, while holding the photo of the girl holding a photo. Then he tosses the camera back into the ocean, where it embarks on another journey, this time with the reader traveling along. In the end, we see the camera swept up onto another beach, where a lonely girl is waiting.
It's amazing what David Wiesner is able to accomplish in this book without any words at all. We see the boy's curiosity and wonder. We follow all of his movements as he finds the camera, shows it to his parents, and checks with the lifeguard to make sure no one has reported it missing. We see vignettes of a hidden underwater world, one that any child would like to imagine really exists. And we see the camera transported by a series of sea creatures, to end up in the lap of another child.
I think that what makes this book work so well is the juxtaposition of the realistic beach scenes with the whimsical deep sea snapshots. The idea of a hidden world just out of view captures the imagination. The chain of photos going back in time gives the story depth, with the child as part of a larger cycle of people, and the camera a constant as time passes. I highly recommend this book for older pre-schoolers and early elementary school children.
This book review was originally published on my blog, Jen Robinson's Book Page, on January 27, 2007. Flotsam recently won the 2007 Caldecott award.
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